A family epic of American Communism

Jonathan Lethem has treaded the sidewalks of his childhood neighborhood in New York in several of his novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. With the epic Dissident Gardens, Lethem remains within the realm of New York borough fiction, but turns his merciless humor and judgment to the fall of American Communism and the search for the “new” American...

New York, New York

In Jonathan Lethem’s latest offering, readers are once again thrust into a genre-bending, category-defying and humorously disjointed New York City. In Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, Lethem explored his favorite outer borough through the lens of noir and fantasy—and now he turns his attentions to Manhattan proper with a surrealistic eye that owes as much to Saul Bellow...

It's only rock Ã”n' roll

<b>It's only rock Ã”n' roll</b> Jonathan Lethem's latest book rocks literally. <b>You Don't Love Me Yet</b>, his first novel since the sprawling, coming-of-age saga <i>Fortress of Solitude</i>, is the story of a group of hipster musicians who live in Los Angeles. Complex yet lighthearted, featuring beautifully styled sentences and Lethem's usual...

A mighty fortress

Jonathan Lethem has spent the better part of his literary career circling the one book everyone knew he would eventually write: the big Brooklyn novel. "I was mostly kind of intimidated by the material itself, the fact of growing up in Brooklyn. I was avoiding it in all of the early books," he admits by phone during a vacation in Bay...

Girl in Landscape review

Jonathan Lethem's newest novel, Girl in Landscape, has drawn comparisons to works as disparate as John Ford's The Searchers and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Though there's truth to this, the author of As She Climbed Across the Table has ventured into unchartered territory with this latest book.I read the book in one night. Granted, I'm a pretty fast reader, but I don't...

Lethem takes on Brooklyn

Thinking about certain writers often brings certain places to mind. Mention James Joyce, for instance, and one cannot help but think of Ireland. William Faulkner's name evokes images of the South, especially Mississippi. So from now on, when anyone says Jonathan Lethem, I will think Brooklyn. In Lethem's novel, Brooklyn is a microcosm of surprising proportions. Here, nothing is as it...